Three arrested in check on Jersey County sex offenders

Alex B. Heeb, aheeb@civitasmedia.com

Published
7:17 pm CDT, Monday, August 28, 2017

Image
1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Three arrested in check on Jersey County sex offenders

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

JERSEY COUNTY — Two registered sex offenders were arrested last week for violating registry laws, and another was arrested on drug charges, during a compliance operation spearheaded by the Jersey County Sheriff’s Department.

According to Sheriff John Wimmersberg, the U.S. Marshals Service and Illinois State Police assisted in the compliance check.

“Last Wednesday we hooked up with the U.S. Marshals, and we did a sex offender compliance check,” he said. “So we went around in teams and had home checks on all the sex offenders in (unincorporated) Jersey County. We found a couple that were out of compliance with their required registrations. And then there were also some drug charges that stemmed from those visits.”

The individuals arrested for registry non-compliance were Timothy J. Anderson, 26, of rural Godfrey and Matthew A. Yost, 34, of rural Jerseyville. Logan S. Vaillancourt, 22, of Dow was arrested when officers found a prohibited substance sitting in plain view in his home. All charges were felonies.

An additional sex offender appears to have fled the area. U.S. Marshals are attempting to locate the individual.

According to Wimmersberg, officers looked for a number of possible violations — checking to be sure addresses of current residence, any schools attended, and work records were up to date.

“(The marshals) will periodically link up with a county and go do compliance checks for sex offenders,” Wimmersberg said. “We had transported an inmate to East St. Louis several months ago, and while we were doing that I was able to talk to some of the marshals down there. They advised that they had done this in the past, and asked if we were interested in doing it now, and I said, ‘of course.’

“Then it was just a matter of linking up and picking a day to do it,” he added. “A lot of it was just having the personnel. There were three U.S. Marshals that came and helped out. The way we did it was we divided up into teams. We had a couple Illinois State Police investigators. And then we had our detective, myself, and several of our deputies just split up into teams and went around the county and checked sex offenders.”